A focus on curriculum, as some Wilton scores lag

By Stephanie Kim

Published
3:04 pm EDT, Saturday, October 21, 2017

WILTON — Looking over the district’s performance on standardized tests in 2016-17, scores at Wilton Public Schools are not as high as Charles Smith would like. The assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction could even understand if some scores at a glance would raise concern among administration and parents, he said.

Compared to schools in Wilton’s District Reference Group, Wilton Public Schools saw middle to lower results on the Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is aligned to Common Core State Standards in English language arts and math. Wilton saw a 4.3 percent drop in the percentage of students who met or exceeded the state goal in ELA, from 2015-16 to 2016-17 — though other districts, except New Canaan and Easton, also experienced a drop. And while the district’s year-to-year percent change rose 2.2 percent in math, Wilton had the lowest percentage (69) in the DRG in 2016-17.

The district also saw a significant drop in the performance among tenth graders on the science Connecticut Mastery Test/Connecticut Academic Performance Test, declining from 82 percent to 61 percent of students who met or exceeded the state goal, from 2016-2017. Smith attributes this drop to changes in curriculum, as this test won’t be administered next year.

“We kind of had middling results,” Smith said. “Certainly not where I would like them to be.”

However, Wilton did see strong performance on the SAT and ACT in 2017. Ninety-five percent of the district’s eleventh graders met or exceeded the state goal in English — tying with Darien for first in the DRG. The district also saw incremental increases in average scores in almost all sections of the ACT over the last five years, with an average composite score (26.9) higher than the state’s (25.2).

Therefore, judging the school’s growth on these scores alone would be more of a cursory look than an accurate analysis, Smith said. Understanding the rise and fall of scores requires an in-depth look at student performance across and within cohorts at each grade level, as well as changes to standardized testing and Common Core Standards implemented statewide and curriculum shifts in the district to meet such standards.

Considering this, Smith reasons that a drop in performance in ELA and science may be connected to the introduction of new curriculum in the district. Revised curriculum in ELA was implemented over the past two school years, while new changes in science are slowly being introduced.

“If kids are going to master the Common Core state standards, teachers have to change the things they’re going to do things. If they kept doing things the way they always did it, our scores are really going to plummet,” Smith said. “So what we really need to do is redouble our efforts to support those teachers in completely mastering this kind of different way of doing this class.”

The key to ensuring teachers and students master state standards comes down to how the curriculum review and implementation cycle are framed, Smith said.

His committee — of administrative reps from each school, program or instructional leaders, teachers, Board of Education members, parents and sometimes community members — takes one year to research and review necessary changes to curriculum in a subject area, using expertise within and outside of the district. Then the committee writes and pilots the change the following year and trains teachers to implement it the year after. The next three years are used to monitor and adjust how the curriculum change is going.

A large part of this system’s success is the staggering of implementation throughout grade levels and the cycling of subject areas, Smith said. Before he joined the district in 2013, new curriculum tended to be pushed district-wide, such as the shift to Singapore Math.

Smith believes some students are still playing catch-up to this day.

“The elementary level, those teachers teach everything. So it’s a little easier to roll out changes in middle and high school, because those teachers are subject-specific,” Smith said. “But when I roll out at the elementary level, I’m impacting the same people. So we staggered it.”

Smith and his committee also brought on 11 instructional coaches to help fill gaps in performance and to support teachers in their professional learning. Although this change received some pushback from the community last year, Smith thinks the addition was necessary to spur growth in the district.

“It’s very clear that if you want to change practice in the classroom, you have to provide in-the-moment-teaching. And many teachers recognize that’s the most respectful way of making that shift in their practice,” Smith said. “My read on what happened last year was that it was a tough budget year. We came at 0. And I think there was concern that classroom teachers might be impacted by that, and I think their feeling was that if we were going to get rid of anything, it should be coaching.”

Smith notes changes have been made to instructional coaching in response to feedback from teachers. Over time, his hope is that the impact of coaching and curriculum planning can go hand-in-hand.

“Over time, my hope is that we are going to see a steady increase in our student achievement and I think coaches will contribute to that,” Smith said. “I’d still point out, most of our kids are on grade level ... And we’re working really hard to make sure that more and more of our students are meeting grade-level standards.”